Six former Yugoslavia nations to renovate a barracks at Auschwitz
Block 17 project to include installation of permanent exhibit on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, which saw the murder of some 66,000 of its 80,000 Jews
PARIS — Six countries of the former Yugoslavia have agreed to renovate a barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp run by the Nazis, which housed nearly 20,000 Yugoslavs deported during World War II, the UN’s cultural agency said Thursday.
The agreement was reached after 14 years of negotiations by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia.
The renovation work of Block 17 will include the installation of a joint permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the former Yugoslavia, which saw the murder of around 66,000 of the country’s 80,000 Jews.
“This historic agreement fills a void, an absence of memory at the very site where these horrors unfolded,” UNESCO’s director general Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.
Talks on the project began in 2010 but were often slowed by “changes in government, interruptions and moments of tension” between the countries, a UNESCO diplomat told AFP.
“Our cooperation in reconstructing block 17 is not only material but also a moral obligation towards those whose destinies were shaped and determined within these walls,” Montenegro’s Culture Minister Tamara Vujovic said at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters.
“The Yugoslav victims of the death camps deserve to be spoken of, their memories preserved and their tragic fates never forgotten.”
Saturday marks the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, built by Nazi Germany after it invaded Poland.
One million European Jews died at the camp in the city of Oswiecim between 1940 and 1945 along with around 80,000 non-Jewish Poles, 25,000 Roma and 20,000 Soviet soldiers.
